Karzai Calls On NATO And US To Stop Operations In Afghanistan

By DPA

March 12, 2011 "DPA" -- Kabul - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that NATO and US should stop their operations in the war-torn country.

"I ask NATO and US, with honor and humbleness and not with arrogance, to stop its operations on our soil," Karzai said in the eastern province of Kunar, according to a statement from the presidential palace.

Karzai visited Kunar on Saturday morning to personally express condolences to the families of nine children who were killed by US air attacks on March 1.

The children were between the age of seven and 13 and collecting firewood in the Manogay district when they came under bombardment.

"Afghans want peace and security and they cooperate with the world bring peace and security," Karzai said. "But we don't want this war to continue any longer. We don't want to repeat such bombardments and casualties."

Speaking at a ceremony held in Asadabad, the headquarters of Kunar, Karzai said the war on terrorism is not in Afghan villages.

"They know where the places are and they should fight there," he said about the international forces.

"We wish NATO officials would see our sons' injured legs and hands. See how much tolerance we have," the statement said, quoting Karzai.

The issue of civilian casualties has been a major point of contention between Afghan government and international forces, mainly the US forces.

United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates apologized last week in Kabul in a joint press conference with Karzai for the death of Afghan boys.

"It breaks our heart. My personal apologies to President Karzai and the Afghan people," Gates said. "Not only is their loss a tragedy for their families, it is a setback for our relationship with the Afghan people."

Karzai said in the press that he respected and accepted the apology, adding that civilian casualties have been a major issue of grief for Afghans and they want it to stop.


Earlier, Karzai had harshly criticized US forces for causing civilian casualties during their operations, rejecting an apology from US General David Petraeus as "not enough" and "no longer acceptable."

A United Nations report released earlier this week said at least 171 civilians were killed by NATO air strike in 2010.

'US Wars to Continue Until its Economy Busts'

By Chris Hedges

January 21, 2011 "Press TV" -- American wars will continue until the country's giant corporations, which pay the politicians in Washington's corridors of power, become financially unsustainable, says senior fellow at the Nation Institute, Chris Hedges.

Hedges told Press TV's U.S. Desk in a Wednesday interview that the economy will fail "because we're paying for it through debt, through borrowing."

HIGHLIGHTS


"Well the fact is like that ... like most wars this is the business. Unlike previous wars we have privatized many of the functions that the traditional military used to do and whether the wars go badly, we're certainly losing the war in Afghanistan," he pointed out.

"And I think it ultimately has been covered in the New York Times that [the Afghan] war is also unwinnable. It doesn't really matter. There are huge corporations whose profits [have] swollen four by four," Hedges said.

"The continuation of these conflicts is good for their bottom-line. That's why we're seeing very little reticence on the part of the government which knows how drastic the situation is in Afghanistan to pull back because the people who hold the ultimate power in the United States, which are corporations want these wars to continue," he went on to say.

Hedges named a number of corporations including Halliburton and Blackwater/Xe and argued that the big firms have obtained substantial profits, saying, "These corporations are doing very, very well. All you have to do is look at the difference in their stock price before 1991 and now."

He said that U.S. President Barack Obama spoke tactically during his presidential campaign "when he said he would withdraw the combat troops from Iraq."

"Even during the campaign if you look at the fine print, Obama wasn't promising" what many expected, he noted.

"There was an acknowledgment that occupation troops would remain in Iraq for many, many years," Hedges concluded.

FACTS AND FIGURES

Roughly 48,000 American troops are still based in Iraq seven years after the start of the war, according to the Washington Post.

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, 4,435 U.S. troops have been killed and more than 31,827 wounded in Iraq, according to the media.

The total cost of the Iraq war has been estimated to be over $3 trillion, according to wsws.org.

Since 2003, more than 1,300,000 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have been killed.

An estimated 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced as a result of the war, according to brussellstribunal.org.

In October 2001 when U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan they had no authorization from the United Nations Security Council. It was only later on, in December, that the UNSC authorized the forces to be present in that country. As such, the Afghanistan war was not authorized by the United Nations Security Council from the start and many experts call it illegal under international law.

There are about 97,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan who, under Washington's plan, were supposed to start withdrawing in July ahead of the scheduled transfer of responsibility for security to Afghan forces in 2014. WSJ

Since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, more than 34,000 Afghan civilians have been killed in the country as a result of the war. Iraq-war.ru

By the end of 2010, the war had resulted in 2,281 coalition casualties, including 1,445 American deaths. U.S. fatalities in 2010 (711) accounted for nearly half of all U.S. deaths since the war began over nine years ago. iCasualties

Noam Chomsky Now Says: No Evidence Al-Qaeda Behind 911

Chomsky: US-led Afghan War, Criminal

By Press TV

November 03,2010 "Press TV" -- Renowned Jewish-American scholar Noam Chomsky says US invasion of Afghanistan was illegal since to date there is no evidence that al-Qaeda has carried out the 9/11 attacks.

"The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any," the 81-year-old senior academic made the remarks on Press TV's program a Simple Question.

"We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any."

The political analyst also said that nonexistence of such evidence was confirmed by FBI eight months later.

"The head of FBI, after the most intense international investigation in history, informed the press that the FBI believed that the plot may have been hatched in Afghanistan, but was probably implemented in the United Arab Emirates and Germany."

Chomsky added that three weeks into the war, "a British officer announced that the US and Britain would continue bombing, until the people of Afghanistan overthrew the Taliban... That was later turned into the official justification for the war."

"All of this was totally illegal. It was more, criminal," Chomsky said.

The 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan was launched with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the country.

Nine years on, however, the American and Afghan officials admit that the country remains unstable and civilians continue to pay the heaviest price.

The Hatred of the "Other"

Kill Them

by Linh Dinh
CommonDreams.org
Published on Saturday, August 28, 2010

Michael Enright, a 21-year-old college student, slashed a NYC cab driver in the face and neck because this man was Muslim. Enright is being held in a psychiatric ward. If he is mad, then the United States is also insane. Enright's assault merely mirrors what we, as a nation, have done for nearly a decade.

The United States has responded criminally and incoherently to what happened on September 11, 2001. Lopped of our twin members, downtown, we also lost our authoritative voice. Two days after that disaster, George Bush grimly declared, "The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." Six months later, Bush shrugged, "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." Our current president never mentions bin Laden, yet Obama has sent many more troops into Afghanistan. We're not leaving any time soon, that's for sure. Congress has just approved 1.3 billion dollars to expand our military bases there. Our new mission, if Time Magazine is to be believed, is to defend Afghan women against the Taliban, whom we created in the first place, to fight the Soviets. America gets a kick out of these flip flops. We propped up Saddam Hussein, then we had him hanged. We fought Communist Vietnam, then we staged a naval exercise with that same regime, as happened just recently, riling up China. Tension feeds the military industrial complex. Wars are even better.

Responding to 9/11, America also invaded Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with that catastrophe. Since the real reasons for our two current conflicts, access to oil and natural gas, defense of the petrodollar, war profiteering, are never admitted to, many Americans have concluded that we're simply waging war against Islam, which is, frankly, not that far off the mark considering our unequivocal support for Israel whenever it attacks Gaza, Lebanon, Syria or any other Muslim population. The U.S. has also been killing Pakistani civilians and threatening Iran. It's a miracle many Muslims don't hate us more.

Without Israel and oil, it's a safe bet we wouldn't be demonizing Muslims so relentlessly. As is, this stoked hatred is bringing out the worst in our character. On Yahoo! News, many comments on the Enright story don't condemn but applaud his obvious crime, and also bash Islam.

Bruce, "Slay the infidel.....stone the rape victim......beat your wife........mate with your goat.....wipe your bu tt with your bare hand.....AHHH the joys of islam!"

David, "this guy should get a medal and be aloud [sic] to blow up the mosque at the ground zero sight, its [sic] about time someone in ny stepped up and showed some american balls!!!"

Spreading like cancer across the internet, openly hateful and racist comments are especially common after stories about Muslims, blacks or Mexicans, the top three scapegoats at the moment. Obama is a lightning rod for anti-black racism, which is ironic because he does not favor blacks in any way. Like Bush, Clinton and the rest of our bank-bailing-out, paid-for politicians, Obama couldn't care less about the little guys. Eyeing his own wallet and his future after the White House, Obama's here to defend the moneyed interest. His blackness is merely symbolic, but that's enough to enrage the racists.

After Michelle Obama went to Spain, Alternative Right, a webzine with contributions from several established authors, had an article titled, "Michelle's Vacation in Whitey World." Among the comments, one man suggested that she should have gone to a blacker destination, like "Ghana or the Maldives."

One Sheila wrote, "I cringe every time I see a photo of the Sasquatch/Wookie as purportedly "First Lady" of American women. My spouse always comments that she reminds him of a chimp with her underbite, and I am always struck by her enormous feet and trapezius muscles. Either way I feel a sort of cognitive dissonance, such as when I view old photos and see 19th century blacks dressed in Victorian clothing. As far as her amazing European adventure, she is putting herself in white people's faces. Her very presence is a way of announcing the new order."

There's no new order, lady. Obama himself is a head fake! Scratch that skin lightly, and you'll see your beloved Dubya again. Everything is still in place, including the torture chambers. After another article in Alternative Right, a reader lamented, "After 9/11, we saw the lack of a white nation identity. There was abject surrender to Islam." Only the most deluded can call the killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and the occupation of two Islamic countries, an "abject surrender to Islam." Although not all Americans think this way, of course, this man is hardly alone. As the world's biggest source of terror, we're posing as its most helpless victims.

The scapegoating of Muslims, blacks and Mexicans gives the appearance that we're being threatened from without and below, when we're actually being mugged from above, from the inside. It's the entrenched who are killing us, not outsiders. Even with 9/11, too many questions remain. One must remember that Bin Laden began as a CIA asset, and two months before the attack, he was at the American hospital in Dubai, where a CIA agent visited him. On September 10, 2001, bin Laden was at the Army Hospital in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, to receive dialysis treatment. Again, no attempt was made to arrest him. Today, we're also not trying to arrest this man, and that's no conspiracy theory.

The Guns of August: Lowering the Flag on the American Century

By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch.com
9:29am, August 17, 2010.

In 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was, of course, looking back at events that had occurred almost 50 years earlier and had at her disposal documents and information not available to participants. They were acting, as Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it, in the fog of war.

So where are we this August of 2010, with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq? Where are we, as we impose sanctions on Iran and North Korea (and threaten worse), while sending our latest wonder weapons, pilotless drones armed with bombs and missiles, into Pakistan's tribal borderlands, Yemen, and who knows where else, tasked with endless "targeted killings" which, in blunter times, used to be called assassinations? Where exactly are we, as we continue to garrison much of the globe even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services?

I wish I had a crystal ball to peer into and see what historians will make of our own guns of August in 2060. The fog of war, after all, is just a stand-in for what might be called "the fog of the future," the inability of humans to peer with any accuracy far into the world to come. Let me nonetheless try to offer a few glimpses of what that foggy landscape some years ahead might reveal, and even hazard a few predictions about what possibilities await still-imperial America.

Let me begin by asking: What harm would befall the United States if we actually decided, against all odds, to close those hundreds and hundreds of bases, large and small, that we garrison around the world? What if we actually dismantled our empire, and came home? Would Genghis Khan-like hordes descend on us? Not likely. Neither a land nor a sea invasion of the U.S. is even conceivable.

Would 9/11-type attacks accelerate? It seems far likelier to me that, as our overseas profile shrank, the possibility of such attacks would shrink with it.

Would various countries we've invaded, sometimes occupied, and tried to set on the path of righteousness and democracy decline into "failed states?" Probably some would, and preventing or controlling this should be the function of the United Nations or of neighboring states. (It is well to remember that the murderous Cambodian regime of Pol Pot was finally brought to an end not by us, but by neighboring Vietnam.)

Sagging Empire

In other words, the main fears you might hear in Washington -- if anyone even bothered to wonder what would happen, should we begin to dismantle our empire -- would prove but chimeras. They would, in fact, be remarkably similar to Washington's dire predictions in the 1970s about states all over Asia, then Africa, and beyond falling, like so many dominoes, to communist domination if we did not win the war in Vietnam.

What, then, would the world be like if the U.S. lost control globally -- Washington's greatest fear and deepest reflection of its own overblown sense of self-worth -- as is in fact happening now despite our best efforts? What would that world be like if the U.S. just gave it all up? What would happen to us if we were no longer the "sole superpower" or the world's self-appointed policeman?

In fact, we would still be a large and powerful nation-state with a host of internal and external problems. An immigration and drug crisis on our southern border, soaring health-care costs, a weakening education system, an aging population, an aging infrastructure, an unending recession -- none of these are likely to go away soon, nor are any of them likely to be tackled in a serious or successful way as long as we continue to spend our wealth on armies, weapons, wars, global garrisons, and bribes for petty dictators.

Even without our interference, the Middle East would continue to export oil, and if China has been buying up an ever larger share of what remains underground in those lands, perhaps that should spur us into conserving more and moving more rapidly into the field of alternative energies.

Rising Power

Meanwhile, whether we dismantle our empire or not, China will become (if it isn't already) the world's next superpower. It, too, faces a host of internal problems, including many of the same ones we have. However, it has a booming economy, a favorable balance of payments vis-à-vis much of the rest of the world (particularly the U.S., which is currently running an annual trade deficit with China of $227 billion), and a government and population determined to develop the country into a powerful, economically dominant nation-state.

Fifty years ago, when I began my academic career as a scholar of China and Japan, I was fascinated by the modern history of both countries. My first book dealt with the way the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s spurred Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party he headed on a trajectory to power, thanks to its nationalist resistance to that foreign invader. Incidentally, it is not difficult to find many examples of this process in which a domestic political group gains power because it champions resistance to foreign troops. In the immediate post-WWII period, it occurred in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia; with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, all over Eastern Europe; and today, it is surely occurring in Afghanistan and probably in Iraq as well.

Once the Cultural Revolution began in China in 1966, I temporarily lost interest in studying the country. I thought I knew where that disastrous internal upheaval was taking China and so turned back to Japan, which by then was well launched on its amazing recovery from World War II, thanks to state-guided, but not state-owned, economic growth.

This pattern of economic development, sometimes called the "developmental state," differed fundamentally from both Soviet-type control of the economy and the laissez-faire approach of the U.S. Despite Japan's success, by the 1990s its increasingly sclerotic bureaucracy had led the country into a prolonged period of deflation and stagnation. Meanwhile, post-U.S.S.R. Russia, briefly in thrall to U.S. economic advice, fell captive to rapacious oligarchs who dismantled the command economy only to enrich themselves.

In China, Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping and his successors were able to watch developments in Japan and Russia, learning from them both. They have clearly adopted effective aspects of both systems for their economy and society. With a modicum of luck, economic and otherwise, and a continuation of its present well-informed, rational leadership, China should continue to prosper without either threatening its neighbors or the United States.

To imagine that China might want to start a war with the U.S. -- even over an issue as deeply emotional as the ultimate political status of Taiwan -- would mean projecting a very different path for that country than the one it is currently embarked on. (Editor's NOTE: As Dr. Joel Clarke Gibbons has argued in his latest book it appears that Taiwan is gradually and peacfully being completely subsumed into the main-land Chinese orbit without US opposition)

Lowering the Flag on the American Century

Thirty-five years from now, America's official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run, as we come face-to-face with, if not necessarily to terms with, our aging infrastructure, declining international clout, and sagging economy. It may, for all we know, still be Hollywood's century decades from now, and so we may still make waves on the cultural scene, just as Britain did in the 1960s with the Beatles and Twiggy. Tourists will undoubtedly still visit some of our natural wonders and perhaps a few of our less scruffy cities, partly because the dollar-exchange rate is likely to be in their favor.

If, however, we were to dismantle our empire of military bases and redirect our economy toward productive, instead of destructive, industries; if we maintained our volunteer armed forces primarily to defend our own shores (and perhaps to be used at the behest of the United Nations); if we began to invest in our infrastructure, education, health care, and savings, then we might have a chance to reinvent ourselves as a productive, normal nation. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. Peering into that foggy future, I simply can't imagine the U.S. dismantling its empire voluntarily, which doesn't mean that, like all sets of imperial garrisons, our bases won't go someday (Editor--sadly I agree).

Instead, I foresee the U.S. drifting along, much as the Obama administration seems to be drifting along in the war in Afghanistan. The common talk among economists today is that high unemployment may linger for another decade. Add in low investment and depressed spending (except perhaps by the government) and I fear T.S. Eliot had it right when he wrote: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."

I have always been a political analyst rather than an activist. That is one reason why I briefly became a consultant to the CIA's top analytical branch, and why I now favor disbanding the Agency. Not only has the CIA lost its raison d'être by allowing its intelligence gathering to become politically tainted, but its clandestine operations have created a climate of impunity in which the U.S. can assassinate, torture, and imprison people at will worldwide. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)

Just as I lost interest in China when that country's leadership headed so blindly down the wrong path during the Cultural Revolution, so I'm afraid I'm losing interest in continuing to analyze and dissect the prospects for the U.S. over the next few years. I applaud the efforts of young journalists to tell it like it is, and of scholars to assemble the data that will one day enable historians to describe where and when we went astray. I especially admire insights from the inside, such as those of ex-military men like Andrew Bacevich and Chuck Spinney. And I am filled with awe by men and women who are willing to risk their careers, incomes, freedom, and even lives to protest -- such as the priests and nuns of SOA Watch, who regularly picket the School of the Americas and call attention to the presence of American military bases and misbehavior in South America.

I'm impressed as well with Pfc. Bradley Manning, if he is indeed the person responsible for potentially making public 92,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan. Daniel Ellsberg has long been calling for someone to do what he himself did when he released the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. He must be surprised that his call has now been answered -- and in such an unlikely way.

My own role these past 20 years has been that of Cassandra, whom the gods gave the gift of foreseeing the future, but also cursed because no one believed her. I wish I could be more optimistic about what's in store for the U.S. Instead, there isn't a day that our own guns of August don't continue to haunt me.

Osama bin Laden--former CIA Asset--likely Dead

CIA without news of Osama bin Laden for almost 9 years

3 July 2010
Voltairenet.com

In an interview with ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper on “This Week” (27 June 2010), CIA Director Leon Panetta said the last time the CIA had “precise information" on Osama bin Laden was when he left Afghanistan to cross into Pakistan (late 2001).

Recruited by the CIA in 1979, Osama bin Laden - of Yemeni-Saudi nationality and a businessman at the time - was in charge of financing the Afghan Mujahideen against the Communists. He purportedly turned against the United States during Operation Desert Storm (1991), and has been tracked down by the CIA ever since. However, contradicting the official account, he was hospitalised in August 2001 at the American Hospital in Dubai, under CIA protection, where he received the visit of various political figures.

The Agency and the political establishment consider him to be the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. However, again contradicting the official version, the FBI’s most wanted fugitive list does not feature OBL in connection with 9/11.

Over the past decade, various audio and video tapes have been attributed by the CIA to Osama bin Laden. However, in contradiction with this official story as well, Swiss experts from The Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence established that the tapes were all fake.

Recall that it was on the pretext of avenging the 9/11 victims and of capturing Osama bin Laden that President Bush ordered the Afghanistan offensive. But, in case OBL is not responsible for the attacks, or is no longer in the region, or may even be dead, then the rhetorical justification for the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would wither away.

Editor's NOTE:

David Ray Griffen has made a persuasive case that Osama bin Laden died in 2001 in the mountainous regions of Tora Bora, Afghanistan and that the US national security state is well aware of it but continues to allege that bin Laden is alive in order to justify the continued Afghanistan war offensive. See the video below in which David Ray Griffen is interviewed by Tom Hartman on the likely death of Osama bin Laden.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert

Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan? Using the McChrystal Moment to Raise a Forbidden Question

Editor's NOTE:

This article by David Ray Griffin is quite lengthy but I encourage readers to proceed to the end. Follow the link to the original article.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert

by Prof. David Ray Griffin
Global Research,
June 25, 2010



There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.”1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft – hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks. (Editor's emphasis throughout)

However, what can be designated the “McChrystal Moment” – the probably brief period during which the media are again focused on the war in Afghanistan in the wake of the Rolling Stone story about General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, which led to his resignation – provides the best opportunity for some time to raise fundamental questions about this war. Various commentators have already been asking some pretty basic questions: about the effectiveness and affordability of the present “counterinsurgency strategy” and even whether American fighting forces should remain in Afghanistan at all. But I am interested in an even more fundamental question: Whether this war was ever really justified by the publicly given reason: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

This question has two parts: First, did these attacks provide a legal justification for the invasion of Afghanistan? Second, if not, did they at least provide a moral justification? Read it ALL...

The War on Afghanistan is a Profit driven "Resource War".

By: Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research,
June 17, 2010

The 2001 bombing and invasion of Afghanistan has been presented to World public opinion as a "Just War", a war directed against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, a war to eliminate "Islamic terrorism" and instate Western style democracy.

The economic dimensions of the "Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT) are rarely mentioned. The post 9/11 "counter-terrorism campaign" has served to obfuscate the real objectives of the US-NATO war.

The war on Afghanistan is part of a profit driven agenda: a war of economic conquest and plunder, "a resource war".

While Afghanistan is acknowledged as a strategic hub in Central Asia, bordering on the former Soviet Union, China and Iran, at the crossroads of pipeline routes and major oil and gas reserves, its huge mineral wealth as well as its untapped natural gas reserves have remained, until June 2010, totally unknown to the American public.

According to a joint report by the Pentagon, the US Geological Survey (USGS) and USAID, Afghanistan is now said to possess "previously unknown" and untapped mineral reserves, estimated authoritatively to be of the order of one trillion dollars (New York Times, U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan - NYTimes.com, June 14, 2010, See also BBC, 14 June 2010).

"The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe."

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerry's.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said... “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines. (New York Times, op. cit.)

Afghanistan could become, according to The New York Times "the Saudi Arabia of lithium". "Lithium is an increasingly vital resource, used in batteries for everything from mobile phones to laptops and key to the future of the electric car." At present Chile, Australia, China and Argentina are the main suppliers of lithium to the world market. Bolivia and Chile are the countries with the largest known reserves of lithium. "The Pentagon has been conducting ground surveys in western Afghanistan. "Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large as those of Bolivia" (U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan - NYTimes.com HERE..., June 14, 2010, see also Lithium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

"Previously Unknown Deposits" of Minerals in Afghanistan

The Pentagon's near one trillion dollar "estimate" of previously "unknown deposits" is a useful smokescreen. The Pentagon one trillion dollar figure is more a trumped up number rather than an estimate: “We took a look at what we knew to be there, and asked what would it be worth now in terms of today’s dollars. The trillion dollar figure seemed to be newsworthy.” (The Sunday Times, London, June 15 2010, emphasis added)

Moreover, the results of a US Geological Survey study (quoted in the Pentagon memo) on Afghanistan's mineral wealth were revealed three years back, at a 2007 Conference organized by the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce. The matter of Afghanistan's mineral riches, however, was not considered newsworthy at the time.

The US Administration's acknowledgment that it first took cognizance of Afghanistan's vast mineral wealth following the release of the USGS 2007 report is an obvious red herring. Afghanistan's mineral wealth and energy resources (including natural gas) were known to both America's business elites and the US government prior to the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1988).

Geological surveys conducted by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s confirm the existence of vast reserves of copper (among the largest in Eurasia), iron, high grade chrome ore, uranium, beryl, barite, lead, zinc, fluorspar, bauxite, lithium, tantalum, emeralds, gold and silver.(Afghanistan, Mining Annual Review, The Mining Journal, June, 1984). These surveys suggest that the actual value of these reserves could indeed be substantially larger than the one trillion dollars "estimate" intimated by the Pentagon-USCG-USAID study.

More recently, in a 2002 report, the Kremlin confirmed what was already known: "It's no secret that Afghanistan possesses rich reserves, in particular of copper at the Aynak deposit, iron ore in Khojagek, uranium, polymetalic ore, oil and gas," (RIA Novosti, January 6, 2002):

"Afghanistan has never been anyone's colony - no foreigner had ever "dug" here before the 1950s. The Hindu Kush mountains, stretching, together with their foothills, over a vast area in Afghanistan, are where the minerals lie. Over the past 40 years, several dozen deposits have been discovered in Afghanistan, and most of these discoveries were sensational. They were kept secret, however, but even so certain facts have recently become known."

It turns out that Afghanistan possesses reserves of nonferrous and ferrous metals and precious stones, and, if exploited, they would possibly be able to cover even the earnings from the drug industry. The copper deposit in Aynak in the southern Afghan Helmand Province is said to be the largest in the Eurasian continent, and its location (40 km from Kabul) makes it cheap to develop. The iron ore deposit at Hajigak in the central Bamian Province yields ore of an extraordinarily high quality, the reserves of which are estimated to be 500m tonnes. A coal deposit has also been discovered not far from there.

Afghanistan is spoken of as a transit country for oil and gas. However, only a very few people know that Soviet specialists discovered huge gas reserves there in the 1960s and built the first gas pipeline in the country to supply gas to Uzbekistan. At that time, the Soviet Union used to receive 2.5 bn cubic metres of Afghan gas annually. During the same period, large deposits of gold, fluorite, barytes and marble onyxes that have a very rare pattern were found.

However, the pegmatite fields discovered to the east of Kabul are a real sensation. Rubies, beryllium, emeralds and kunzites and hiddenites that cannot be found anywhere else - the deposits of these precious stones stretch for hundreds of kilometres. Also, the rocks containing the rare metals beryllium, thorium, lithium and tantalum are of strategic importance (they are used in air and spacecraft construction).

The war is worth waging. ... (Olga Borisova, "Afghanistan - the Emerald Country", Karavan, Almaty, original Russian, translated by BBC News Services, Apr 26, 2002. p. 10, emphasis added.)

While public opinion was fed images of a war torn resourceless developing country, the realities are otherwise: Afghanstan is a rich country as confirmed by Soviet era geological surveys.

The issue of "previously unknown deposits" sustains a falsehood. It excludes Afghanstan's vast mineral wealth as a justifiable casus belli. It says that the Pentagon only recently became aware that Afghanistan was among the World's most wealthy mineral economies, comparable to The Democratic Republic of the Congo or former Zaire of the Mobutu era. The Soviet geopolitical reports were known. During the Cold War, all this information was known in minute detail:

... Extensive Soviet exploration produced superb geological maps and reports that listed more than 1,400 mineral outcroppings, along with about 70 commercially viable deposits ... The Soviet Union subsequently committed more than $650 million for resource exploration and development in Afghanistan, with proposed projects including an oil refinery capable of producing a half-million tons per annum, as well as a smelting complex for the Ainak deposit that was to have produced 1.5 million tons of copper per year. In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal a subsequent World Bank analysis projected that the Ainak copper production alone could eventually capture as much as 2 percent of the annual world market. The country is also blessed with massive coal deposits, one of which, the Hajigak iron deposit, in the Hindu Kush mountain range west of Kabul, is assessed as one of the largest high-grade deposits in the world. (John C. K. Daly, Analysis: Afghanistan's untapped energy, UPI Energy, October 24, 2008, emphasis added)

Afghanistan's Natural Gas

Afghanistan is a land bridge. The 2001 U.S. led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has been analysed by critics of US foreign policy as a means to securing control over the strategic trans-Afghan transport corridor which links the Caspian sea basin to the Arabian sea.

Several trans-Afghan oil and gas pipeline projects have been contemplated including the planned $8.0 billion TAPI pipeline project (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India) of 1900 km., which would transport Turkmen natural gas across Afghanistan in what is described as a "crucial transit corridor". (See Gary Olson, Afghanistan has never been the 'good and necessary' war; it's about control of oil, The Morning Call, October 1, 2009). Military escalation under the extended Af-Pak war bears a relationship to TAPI. Turkmenistan possesses third largest natural gas reserves after Russia and Iran. Strategic control over the transport routes out of Turkmenistan have been part of Washington's agenda since the collapse of the Soviet union in 1991.

What was rarely contemplated in pipeline geopolitics, however, is that Afghanistan is not only adjacent to countries which are rich in oil and natural gas (e.g Turkmenistan), it also possesses within its territory sizeable untapped reserves of natural gas, coal and oil. Soviet estimates of the 1970s placed "Afghanistan's 'explored' (proved plus probable) gas reserves at about 5 trillion cubic feet. The Hodja-Gugerdag's initial reserves were placed at slightly more than 2 tcf." (See, The Soviet Union to retain influence in Afghanistan, Oil & Gas Journal, May 2, 1988).

The US.Energy Information Administration (EIA) acknowledged in 2008 that Afghanistan's natural gas reserves are "substantial":

"As northern Afghanistan is a 'southward extension of Central Asia's highly prolific, natural gas-prone Amu Darya Basin,' Afghanistan 'has proven, probable and possible natural gas reserves of about 5 trillion cubic feet.'" (UPI, John C.K. Daly, Analysis: Afghanistan's untapped energy, October 24, 2008)

From the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war in 1979, Washington's objective has been to sustain a geopolitical foothold in Central Asia.

The Golden Crescent Drug Trade

America's covert war, namely its support to the Mujahideen "Freedom fighters" (aka Al Qaeda) was also geared towards the development of the Golden Crescent trade in opiates, which was used by US intelligence to fund the insurgency directed against the Soviets.1

Instated at the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war and protected by the CIA, the drug trade developed over the years into a highly lucrative multibillion undertaking. It was the cornerstone of America's covert war in the 1980s. Today, under US-NATO military occupation, the drug trade generates cash earnings in Western markets in excess of $200 billion dollars a year. (See Michel Chossudovsky, America's War on Terrorism, Global Research, Montreal, 2005, see also Michel Chossudovsky, Heroin is "Good for Your Health": Occupation Forces support Afghan Narcotics Trade, HERE... Global Research, April 29, 2007)

Towards an Economy of Plunder

The US media, in chorus, has upheld the "recent discovery" of Afghanistan's mineral wealth as "a solution" to the development of the country's war torn economy as well as a means to eliminating poverty. The 2001 US-NATO invasion and occupation has set the stage for their appropriation by Western mining and energy conglomerates.

The war on Afghanistan is a profit driven "resource war".

Under US and allied occupation, this mineral wealth is slated to be plundered, once the country has been pacified, by a handful of multinational mining conglomerates. According to Olga Borisova, writing in the months following the October 2001 invasion, the US-led "war on terrorism [will be transformed] into a colonial policy of influencing a fabulously wealthy country." (Borisova, op cit).

Part of the US-NATO agenda is also to eventually take possession of Afghanistan's reserves of natural gas, as well as prevent the development of competing Russian, Iranian and Chinese energy interests in Afghanistan.

Note

1. The Golden Crescent trade in opiates constitutes, at present, the centerpiece of Afghanistan's export economy. The heroin trade, instated at the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war in 1979 and protected by the CIA, generates cash earnings in Western markets in excess of $200 billion dollars a year. Since the 2001 invasion, narcotics production in Afghanistan has increased more than 35 times. In 2009, opium production stood at 6900 tons, compared to less than 200 tons in 2001. In this regard, the multibillion dollar earnings resulting from the Afghan opium production largely occur outside Afghanistan. According to United Nations data, the revenues of the drug trade accruing to the local economy are of the order of 2-3 billion annually. In contrast with the Worldwide sales of heroin resultring from the trade in Afghan opiates, in excess of $200 billion. (See Michel Chossudovsky, America's War on Terrorism", Global Research, Montreal, 2005)

Stumbling About In the Graveyard of Empires

By David Michael Green

March 20, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- If there was ever a decent justification visible for the American war in Afghanistan, there isn't now.

That doesn't mean that one is impossible to imagine. I'm no fan of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, though that alone doesn't justify invading the country. Nor does a military occupation necessarily make things better, even if you assume that a particular regime is noxious enough that a regime decapitation is warranted. Time after time, great powers have learned to their chagrin that the natives don't always necessarily appreciate being invaded, occupied and told who the new boss replacing the old boss will be. People can be odd that way.

But leave all that aside for the moment. Maybe al Qaeda did 9/11, as we were told. Maybe the Taliban were harboring them. Maybe both had a violent, regressive and otherwise just generally ugly agenda. Maybe there was even justification enough for invading in 2001.

I nevertheless meant my initial critique quite literally, however. Whatever may or may not have been the case in 2001, it's now 2010, and any such clarity or justification is now invisible. Indeed, what I find most astonishing about America's latest military adventure is just how much this gravest of national decisions is not being seriously discussed in our national discourse.

Perhaps even more amazing is the degree to which that is true from the bottom of the national security policy process all the way up to the top. The proper way to conceive and consider these issues, I would argue, is in the form of a nested contextual hierarchy, in which each level of policy analysis has to justify decisions to the one, and ones, above it. We, as a body politic, are talking about and thinking about Afghanistan at none of these levels. In fact, of course, we're basically not talking about and thinking about Afghanistan at all.

The lowest level of policy decision-making is the tactical. America has to decide exactly how it is going to prosecute the war. We don't hear very much about that, which is itself more than troubling. Reports are now beginning to show up in the alternative press - but, significantly, not in the mainstream - of tactical operations all too reminiscent of those brutal affairs which have appeared previously in Iraq and Pakistan. Allegations are now surfacing about innocent civilians either being subjected to intentional human rights and war crimes violations, right up to and including murder, or at least wonton disregard for the "collateral damage" caused by battlefield tactics. There is certainly a moral question at stake here, and one that we are just not discussing.

But there is also simply the pragmatic question of whether such tactics properly service our strategy in Afghanistan, the next level up in the hierarchy. But what is American strategy? The latest version seems to be an ‘improvement' over the notion of simply defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda in battlefield engagements. Now the Pentagon brass and theater commanders are talking about following military clearing operations with ‘government-in-a-box' nation-building initiatives, ostensibly for purposes of winning the ubiquitous hearts and minds typically sought by contemporary counterinsurgency occupation forces. Theoretically, providing Afghans with security and with efficient, corruption-free governance will help to win their allegiance to a ‘better' (read American sponsored) way. While the ideas have some merit on paper, they also ignore the historical realities of similar attempts in Vietnam and Iraq, and they require for credibility that we suspend everything we know about America's long-time ongoing national version of the same strategy in Afghanistan, which has witnessed the Karzai puppet regime spending the better part of the last decade demonstrating just how corrupt a government can possibly be, and just how ineffective as well - at least when it comes to everything other than stealing elections or just plain stealing.

But strategy, of course, is not its own end. Strategy is used to achieve certain objectives which form the very purpose for fighting a war. Barack Obama is not quite as lame as George W. Bush in this respect (not exactly a stunning achievement, that), who argued that America should be at war with the weapon terrorism - as opposed to an actual adversary using that weapon. While we can say that Obama is not as deceitful (at least on this score) or idiotic as Bush, that's pretty much true of the entire world, isn't it? More importantly, what are America's aims in massively escalating our presence in Afghanistan? Are we trying to defeat the Taliban? Remove al Qaeda from the country (even though the Pentagon says there's only about a hundred of them left there)? Create a Jeffersonian democracy? Install an ally? Lift the country out of poverty? Again, it astonishes me that one could take a country to war without this most obvious question being part of the national discourse. But it isn't.

And neither is the question of how ‘winning' in Afghanistan, whatever that would actually mean, would effect American national security, just in the short term. If only for the sake of argument, suppose the United States could achieve whatever objectives are entailed by the notion of winning the war there. How long would it take? What would it cost in dollars? How many lives would be lost? What actual, live, current threat would be extinguished, such that America would be safer? What would be traded off, in terms of other uses of the money - from education to infrastructure to paying down the national debt - in order to win this war? What other possible security concerns would go unaddressed because the US took all its armies on the Risk board and moved them from Irkutsk and Yakutsk and Mongolia to Kamchatka? None of these questions have been addressed in the United States, let alone answered. And those just represent short-term security concerns.

As for each level of security policy analysis discussed above, short-term definitions of success should be constructed to give service to the next level up, medium-term ones. If it's true that there is a broader struggle going on against some sort of wider American enemy, of which Afghanistan is simply a single theater of operations, then the medium-term security question one has to ask is whether putting so many resources into that single theater makes sense in the context of the bigger objective. If al Qaeda is located in 60 countries, for example, is it smart to stick 100,000 American troops in just one of them, and spend a trillion bucks hunting down a hundred people, especially when they can just slide over the border into Pakistan almost at will?

Finally, is the medium-term aspiration for the country serving well the long-term foreign policy goals of the United States in which it should be nested? Are these policies likely to leave us better off, somehow, twenty and fifty years from now? Does an American presence in Afghanistan better America's position in the world, both with respect to friendly countries, and with respect to rivals, real and potential? It certainly doesn't seem to be having a positive effect with the former group, as NATO allies appear less and less interested in supporting American efforts in the country, either by being there at all, or by being anywhere near harm's way. As to potential rivals, could anything possibly be more amusing than this war to the grand strategists in Moscow and Beijing, hoping to supercede American as the hegemon of the new century? If there is any such possibility, it could only be the US blunder in Iraq. Either way, America could hardly have given its rivals a greater gift if we had simply wrapped a ribbon around the capitol and stuck a bow on the dome. Yes, as a matter of fact, history's lesson is correct - empires do die from within, not from external assault. Idiocy is more lethal than are Huns.

Like everything in America, both the Afghan war and US foreign policy in general have been relentlessly politicized in the last decades, ever since doing so was discovered as a survival technique for the otherwise completely bankrupt politics of the right. Regressives get more mileage out of knee-jerk reactionary national security fears than anything else they can invent as a reason for their existence. At the same time, pacifists on the left make the mistake of believing that there is no situation for which war is the appropriate response. I wish that that were true, but, unfortunately, it isn't. If I have to choose between World War II and a Thousand-Year Reich of darkness descending over the planet (which would, of course, entail at least as much mass violence, anyhow, to go along with all the repression and civilizational regression), I reluctantly choose war.

The problem for the United States, however, is that it long ago forgot about the reluctant part. We just keep going to war, decade after decade, from Korea to Vietnam to Grenada to Iraq to Panama to Bosnia and back to Iraq and so on. You could make an argument, as regressives often do, that the reason that we are completely unmatched by any other country in the world for the frequency with which we have gone to war over the last century is because we are doing the heavy lifting of international security that others either cannot or will not do. I'd say there's even some truth to that in some cases. By my estimation, about half of America's wars had at least a moderately legitimate casus belli. But that, of course, leaves the other half. When you're talking about the single gravest decision a society can make, it wouldn't hurt to get it right more often than you would by random chance, say by flipping a coin.

Afghanistan is one of the muddier cases, from the perspective of its moral justification. That's true, first, because it is really two cases - then and now. If it was actually true that al Qaeda did 9/11 and that the Taliban refused to give up the perpetrators, then I think invading Afghanistan in order to go after those individuals was an appropriate response, however reluctant I am ever to support violence, especially at the scale of war, and however clear it is that America's policies in the world all too often harm others. (Similarly, I think it equally appropriate that George W. Bush and gang ought to be sitting in an ICC courtroom right now, on trial for their crimes.) But now that first version of the war is long over, yet another botched product of the Bush administration, and al Qaeda has largely been neither captured nor killed, but instead driven into Pakistan. Whatever legitimate justification there was for the first phase of a US war in Afghanistan seems to me completely absent now that we are in the second.

And yet the president (another botch king, of a somewhat different and some similar sort) is dramatically escalating the American military presence there. I do not see any moral justification for that.

But part of why I don't see that is because we basically have not been presented with any justification whatsoever. And the reason that hasn't happened is because we, as a society, are not addressing seriously any of the nested policy questions necessary to an intelligent and just formulation of American foreign policy.

Are we using tactics in Afghanistan that are as humane as possible and that can work?

Do those tactics serve our strategy there, assuming we know what that is?

Does our strategy serve our goals for fighting a war in Afghanistan?

Do those political goals for the war serve a broader short-term American foreign policy outside of Afghanistan?

Do those short-term goals advance medium-term US foreign policy goals?

And do those medium-term goals serve the country's long-term goals?

Most of these questions are almost impossible to answer decisively, for the reason that we don't actually know what the country's tactics or strategy or goals are.

But if one had to try to answer these questions, based on the best information available, you'd probably have to say: No, no, no, no, no, no and no.

Not very impressive. It's one thing for a government to act recklessly with the lives of its citizens and those of other people, elsewhere. In less politically mature countries, like America, that is all too sadly still to be expected.

But where is the public which, in a democracy, can control their government? Where are the fine American citizens, with their "Support the Troops" bumper-stickers cracked and fading on the back of their SUVs? Where are the great advocates of Christian morality, reading about cheek-turning in their bibles at night, and pouring out of churches on Sunday mornings?

Where are they, indeed?

Probably too busy watching American Idol reruns to ask these crucial questions, and to demand legitimate answers to them before they will allow their government to fight an increasingly violent war in Afghanistan.
It's important to keep your priorities straight, you know.

NOTE:

One problem with this author's piece is that he simply accepts as fact that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. He does not discuss the fact that bin Laden is not on the FBI's "most wanted list",that the United States refused to furnish the Taliban with evidence of bin Laden's guilt and that former Secretary of State Colin Powell who promised to provide the American public with evidence that bin Laden's Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks--never did so.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert

The Military-Industrial Complex is Ruining the Economy

by Washington's Blog
January 9, 2010

Everyone knows that the too big to fails and their dishonest and footsy-playing regulators and politicians are largely responsible for trashing the economy.

But the military-industrial complex shares much of the blame.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that the Iraq war will cost $3-5 trillion dollars.

Sure, experts say that the Iraq war has increased the threat of terrorism. See this, this, this, this, this, this and this. And we launched the Iraq war based on the false linkage of Saddam and 9/11, and knowingly false claims that Saddam had WMDs. And top British officials, former CIA director George Tenet, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and many others say that the Iraq war was planned before 9/11. But this essay is about dollars and cents.

America is also spending a pretty penny in Afghanistan. The U.S. admits there are only a small handful of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. As ABC notes:

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.

With 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at an estimated yearly cost of $30 billion, it means that for every one al Qaeda fighter, the U.S. will commit 1,000 troops and $300 million a year.

Sure, the government apparently planned the Afghanistan war before 9/11 (see this and this). And the Taliban offered to turn over Bin Laden (see this and this). And we could have easily killed Bin Laden in 2001 and again in 2007, but chose not to, even though that would have saved the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars in costs in prosecuting the Afghanistan war. But this essay is about dollars and cents.

Increasing the Debt Burden of a Nation Sinking In Debt

All of the spending on unnecessary wars adds up.

The U.S. is adding trillions to its debt burden to finance its multiple wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.

Two top American economists - Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff - show that the more indebted a country is, with a government debt/GDP ratio of 0.9, and external debt/GDP of 0.6 being critical thresholds, the more GDP growth drops materially.

Specifically, Reinhart and Rogoff write:

The relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. We find that the threshold for public debt is similar in advanced and emerging economies...

Indeed, it should be obvious to anyone who looks at the issue that deficits do matter.

A PhD economist told me:

War always causes recession. Well, if it is a very short war, then it may stimulate the economy in the short-run. But if there is not a quick victory and it drags on, then wars always put the nation waging war into a recession and hurt its economy.

You know about America's unemployment problem. You may have even heard that the U.S. may very well have suffered a permanent destruction of jobs.

But did you know that the defense employment sector is booming? MORE...

President Obama's Secret: Only 100 al Qaeda Now in Afghanistan

With New Surge, One Thousand U.S. Soldiers and $300 Million for Every One al Qaeda Fighter

By RICHARD ESPOSITO, MATTHEW COLE and BRIAN ROSS

December 03, 2009 "ABC News" - Dec. 2, 2009 — As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama's description Tuesday of the al Qaeda "cancer" in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.

A senior U.S. intelligence official told ABCNews.com the approximate estimate of 100 al Qaeda members left in Afghanistan reflects the conclusion of American intelligence agencies and the Defense Department. The relatively small number was part of the intelligence passed on to the White House as President Obama conducted his deliberations.

President Obama made only a vague reference to the size of the al Qaeda presence in his speech at West Point, when he said, "al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same number as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border."

A spokesperson at the White House's National Security Council, Chris Hensman, said he could not comment on intelligence matters.

Obama's National Security Adviser, Gen. James Jones, put the number at "fewer than a hundred" in an October interview with CNN.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., referred to the number at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee in October, saying "intelligence says about a hundred al Qaeda in Afghanistan."

As the President acknowledged, al Qaeda now operates from Pakistan where U.S. troops are prohibited from operating. "We're in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country," he said.

Intelligence officials estimate there are several hundred al Qaeda fighters just across the border in Pakistan.

An Obama administration official said the additional troops were needed in Afghanistan to "sandwich" al Qaeda between Pakistan and Afghanistan and prevent them from re-establishing a safe haven in Afghanistan.

"Pakistan has been stepping up its efforts," the official said.

"So the real question is will Pakistan do enough," said former White House counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant.

"What if they take all the money we given them but don't really follow through? What the strategy then?" said Clarke.

With 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at an estimated yearly cost of $30 billion, it means that for every one al Qaeda fighter, the U.S. will commit 1,000 troops and $300 million a year.

al Qaeda's Ideological Influence

Other counter-terror analysts say the actual number of al Qaeda in Afghanistan is less important than their ability to train others in the Taliban and have ideological influence.

"A hundred 'no foolin' al Qaeda operatives operating in a safe haven can do a hell of a lot of damage," said one former intelligence official with significant past experience in the region.

At a Senate hearing, the former CIA Pakistan station chief, Bob Grenier, testified al Qaeda had already been defeated in Afghanistan.

"So in terms of 'in Afghanistan,'" asked Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., "they have been disrupted and dismantled and defeated. They're not in Afghanistan, correct?"

"That's true," replied Grenier.

The U.S. Government Is Taking Us Down

By Jacob G. Hornberger

December 01, 2009 "fff" --- President Obama has decided to up the ante in Afghanistan by acceding to his generals’ request to send an additional 34,000 troops to that beleaguered nation. What better proof that those of us who opposed the initial invasion of Afghanistan were right? The decision to treat the 9/11 attacks as a military problem, rather than a criminal-justice one, has turned out to be one unmitigated disaster, a disaster that seemingly has no end.

After all, the occupation has now been going on for 8 years. Eight years of bombs, shootings, killing, maiming, secret prisons, arbitrary arrests, torture, indefinite incarcerations, and unrestrained power to search and seize.

And eight years of unrestrained spending on armaments, soldiers, and weaponry.

Where has it gotten the American people? Nothing but more anger and rage against them among Muslims all over the world, not to mention an ever-increasing mountain of debt that is sure to send America’s currency into a free-fall.

What will those additional troops do? They will kill and maim and incarcerate and torture people. That’s their job. Sure, they’ll call it pacifying the country, establishing law and order, spreading democracy, and waging the war on terrorism.

Yet, as they kill, maim, torture, and incarcerate more Afghanis, at the same time they will be producing more anger and rage against the United States among friends, relatives, and countrymen of the victims.

Moreover, since the victims in Afghanistan are predominantly Muslim, it is inevitable that Muslims all over the world will continue to perceive the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan (and Iraq) as a U.S. crusade against Islam. Denials by U.S. officials will continue to fall upon deaf ears within the Muslim community. With each new death at the hands of U.S. military personnel, the ranks of the terrorists will continue to swell, not just in Afghanistan but all over the world.

What began as an attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden has morphed into an involvement in a civil war. Those 34,000 troops aren’t being sent to Afghanistan to find bin Laden. They’re being sent there to kill people whose regime was ousted from power eight years ago and to maintain a crooked, corrupt, fraudulent, drug-pushing U.S. puppet regime in power.

We should also bear in mind that among the Afghanis who U.S. officials term “bad guys” are those Afghanis who simply are resisting the illegal occupation of their country by a foreign invader and occupier. There is a moral and just alternative to killing such people: Simply exit the country.

In fact, it would be interesting to know what percentage of Afghanis killed by the U.S. military during the past 8 years, including those wedding parties that are bombed from time to time, had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. My hunch: 99.99 percent of the total number of Afghanis killed had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Of course, we don’t know how many Afghanis have been killed because U.S. policy is to keep track only of Western casualties.

On top of all this is a simple financial fact: the longer the U.S. government occupies Afghanistan (and Iraq), the closer to national bankruptcy America comes. The additional troops are estimated to cost more than $30 billion dollars. That inevitably means double or triple that.

Yet, where is all that money coming from? We all know that ever since 9/11, U.S. officials have been spending much more than what the IRS is seizing from the taxpayers. To avoid taxpayer ire, they’ve been borrowing the difference, especially from the communist regime in China, which has become the U.S. government’s chief foreign lender.

The pro-empire, pro-intervention crowd is taking our country down. Today, they tell us that they’re trapped — that they have no choice — that in order to achieve “success,” they have to continue doing the same thing they’ve done for the past 8 years. If that’s not insane, what is?

America need not fear the terrorists or even a foreign invasion. The U.S. government is doing a fine job taking down our country all on its own.

Has The USA Forgotten Peace

By Gordon Duff

December 01, 2009 "Veterans Today" -- Tonight, I will listen to the President tell me that it will take years to withdraw from Afghanistan. He will, out of political necessity tell a series of lies. He will lie by omission, failing to tell people that this war, our "good war" was, when the facts are examined, a farce. There has not been a credible word from Osama bin Laden since December, 2001, when his death was announced in the Islamic press. What other reason did we have to occupy Afghanistan and lead it into total ruin?

The President will also lie because he has been lied to. He will present solutions, solutions sending troops into harms way, troops meant to build a government and country that force of arms can only destroy.
Years of propaganda and war mongering has made it impossible for any honest dialog about war. Years of lying, lying for politics, lying for profit, lying in support of treasonous foreign interests has left us with nothing to build on. No honest voice is left, just screaming liars paid by thieves claiming to represent the right or the left.

Neither really exist. If it talks, if it squawks, it is paid off by someone and is probably lying. Our government has their own business, getting elected, taking care of rich constituents and making sure war profiteers keep raking it in.

Without a voice of opposition from the people, as there is certainly no opposition in Washington, especially since the GOP is tied to the apron strings of the insurance industry and big oil and has no time for simple people, there will be no voice to scream "STOP."

Yes, support the troops. Bring them home to their families, let the villagers in Afghanistan continue whatever they have been doing for 300 years and stay out of it. We have managed to build a massive economy around playing at war. How many lobbyists does it require to hold a village in Afghanistan?

How many Predator drones does it require to find a bed for a homeless veteran?

How many mercenaries does it take to teach an amputee how to walk?

How many intelligence analysts does it take to figure out that if you keep doing the same thing over and over and it doesn't work, but you keep doing the same thing anyway, it is a sign you are nuts?

How long is it going to take us to realize that NOBODY is on our side. We think we are the new Roman empire, the policeman of the world. America isn't Caesar's Rome, not even the Rome of Augustus. We are the Rome of Nero and Caligula, a society steeped in corruption, excess and debauchery. How many Americans think of Washington DC as a center of culture and stability?

Does anyone even think America has a policy or government? Are we a country or simply a group of people ruled by a government owned and operated by special interest groups who dip into our treasury at will, send our kids off to war for amusement serve the agendas of "flavor of the month" allies, often brutal dictatorships disguised as enlightened democracies.

Over 40 years ago, America began to awaken to the fact that the war in Vietnam was a senseless slaughter having nothing to do with American values or security. President Obama is the 3rd president in my lifetime elected based on his promise to end a war.

In 1952, Eisenhower promised peace in Korea. We still have troops there nearly 6 decades later and wait daily for war to break out again.

In 1968, Nixon promised a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam. His plan, fight for 4 more years, killing 20,000 more Americans, then abandon most of our POWs and give Vietnam to the communists.

Tonite we hear another secret plan to end a war. Will we hear the truth? Not hardly!

"8 years ago we invaded Afghanistan and a short time later, Iraq, to punish a small group of murderers that killed 3000 Americans. As time has gone on, we now know that much of what we believed about those attacks is false. Evidence now points, not only to terror groups, but to countries we thought to be friends and there is even evidence of complicity here at home.

After years of phony intelligence, propaganda campaigns and torturing false confessions out of detainees, nothing can be trusted.

Donald Rumsfeld tells it best. He went before the 9/11 Commission stating there was never any indication that terror attacks of the kind seen on 9/11 were possible nor did he receive any warning. We now know that nearly every word he and so many others told that commission were lies, unquestionable, proven and done with remorseless cynicism.

8 years, the illegal invasion of Iraq, the engineering of an economic collapse in America, the corruption of our laws, of our national honor and our moral standing make it impossible for me to continue the war in Afghanistan.

No more Americans will die because of the criminality of a few. Are the few foreign terrorists or Americans, politicians, lobbyists, industrialist, bankers and their good friends overseas in Saudi Arabia or maybe Israel.

How can we order the deaths of thousands of Americans when the real "evil doers" at home run free? We know their names, we know their crimes. How can we bring justice and democracy to others when we, ourselves, have none?

Nearly 10,000 Americans are dead, tens of thousands wounded and trillions of dollars are missing. There is much more proof that these deaths and this massive theft was caused by a domestic conspiracy than any foreign intrigue.

First, we clean our own home, then we carry democracy to others."

Will we hear this tonight?

Veterans Today Senior Editor Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.

Wars, Rumors of Wars, Advance of the US Empire

U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan's History

By Rick Rozoff
Global Research,
September 24, 2009

Over the past week U.S. newspapers and television networks have been abuzz with reports that Washington and its NATO allies are planning an unprecedented increase of troops for the war in Afghanistan, even in addition to the 17,000 new American and several thousand NATO forces that have been committed to the war so far this year.

The number, based on as yet unsubstantiated reports of what U.S. and NATO commander Stanley McChrystal and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen have demanded of the White House, range from 10,000 to 45,000.

Fox News has cited figures as high as 45,000 more American soldiers and ABC News as many as 40,000. On September 15 the Christian Science Monitor wrote of "perhaps as many as 45,000."

The similarity of the estimates indicate that a number has been agreed upon and America's obedient media is preparing domestic audiences for the possibility of the largest escalation of foreign armed forces in Afghanistan's history. Only seven years ago the United States had 5,000 troops in the country, but was scheduled to have 68,000 by December even before the reports of new deployments surfaced.

An additional 45,000 troops would bring the U.S. total to 113,000. There are also 35,000 troops from some 50 other nations serving under NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the nation, which would raise combined troop strength under McChrystal's command to 148,000 if the larger number of rumored increases materializes.

As the former Soviet Union withdrew its soldiers from Afghanistan twenty years ago the New York Times reported "At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed." [1]

Nearly 150,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan would represent the largest foreign military presence ever in the land.

Rather than addressing this historic watershed, the American media is full of innuendos and "privileged" speculation on who has leaked the information and why, as to commercial news operations the tawdry world of Byzantine intrigues among and between American politicians, generals and the Fourth Estate is of more importance that the lengthiest and largest war in the world.

One that has been estimated by the chief of the British armed forces and other leading Western officials to last decades and that has already been extended into Pakistan, a nation with a population almost six times that of Afghanistan and in possession of nuclear weapons.

Two weeks ago the Dutch media reported that during a visit to the Netherlands "General Stanley McChrystal [said] he is considering the possibility of merging...Operation Enduring Freedom with NATO's ISAF force." [2] That is, not only would he continue to command all U.S. and NATO troops, but the two commands would be melded into one.

The call for up to 45,000 more American troops was first adumbrated in mid-September by U.S. armed forces chief Michael Mullen, with the Associated Press stating "The top U.S. military officer says that winning in Afghanistan will probably mean sending more troops." [3]

Four days later, September 19, Reuters reported that "The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has drawn up a long-awaited and detailed request for additional troops but has not yet sent it to Washington, a spokesman said on Saturday."

"He said General Stanley McChrystal completed the document this week, setting out exactly how many U.S. and NATO troops, Afghan security force members and civilians he thinks he needs." [4]

The Pentagon spokesman mentioned above, Lieutenant-Colonel Tadd Sholtis, said, "We're working with Washington as well as the other NATO participants about how it's best to submit this," refusing to divulge any details. [5]

Two days later the Washington Post published a 66-page "redacted" version of General McChrystal's Commander's Initial Assessment which began with this background information:

"On 26 June, 2009, the United States Secretary of Defense directed Commander, United States Central Command (CDRUSCENTCOM), to provide a multidisciplinary assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. On 02 July, 2009, Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force (COMISAF) / U.S. Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A), received direction from CDRUSCENTCOM to complete the overall review."

"On 01 July, 2009, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and NATO Secretary General also issued a similar directive."

"COMISAF [Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force] subsequently issued an order to the ISAF staff and component commands to conduct a comprehensive review to assess the overall situation, review plans and ongoing efforts, and identify revisions to operational, tactical and strategic guidance."

The main focus of the report, not surprising given McChrystal's previous role as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the Pentagon's preeminent special operations unit, in Iraq, is concentrated and intensified counterinsurgency war.

It includes the demand that "NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) requires a new strategy....This new strategy must also be properly resourced and executed through an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign....This is a different kind of fight. We must conduct classic counterinsurgency operations in an environment that is uniquely complex....Success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign."

McChrystal's evaluation also indicates that the war will not only escalate within Afghanistan but will also be stepped up inside Pakistan and may even target Iran.

"Afghanistan's insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan. Senior leaders of the major Afghan insurgent groups are based in Pakistan, are linked with al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups, and are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan's ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence]."

"Iranian Qods Force [part of the nation's army] is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups and providing other forms of military assistance to insurgents. Iran's current policies and actions do not pose a short-term threat to the mission, but Iran has the capability to threaten the mission in the future."

That the ISI has had links to armed extremists is no revelation. The Pentagon and the CIA worked hand-in-glove with it from 1979 onward to subvert successive governments in Afghanistan. That Iran is "training fighters for certain Taliban groups" is a provocational fabrication.

As to who is responsible for the thirty-year disaster that is Afghanistan, McChrystal's assessment contains a sentence that may get past most readers. It is this:

"The major insurgent groups in order of their threat to the mission are: the Quetta Shura Taliban (05T), the Haqqani Network (HQN), and the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HiG)."

The last-named is the guerrilla force of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the largest recipient of hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of U.S. dollars provided by the CIA to the Peshawar Seven Mujahideen bloc fighting the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan from 1978-1992.

While hosting Hekmatyar and his allies at the White House in 1985 then President Ronald Reagan referred to his guests as "the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers.”

Throughout the 1980s the CIA official in large part tasked to assist the Mujahideen with funds, arms and training was Robert Gates, now U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Last December BBC News reported:

"In his book, From the Shadows, published in 1996, Mr Gates defended the role of the CIA in undertaking covert action which, he argued, helped to win the Cold War."

"In a speech in 1999, Mr Gates said that its most important role was in Afghanistan."

"'CIA had important successes in covert action. Perhaps the most consequential of all was Afghanistan where CIA, with its management, funneled billions of dollars in supplies and weapons to the Mujahideen, and the resistance was thus able to fight the vaunted Soviet army to a standoff and eventually force a political decision to withdraw,' he said." [6]

Now according to McChrystal the same Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who was cultivated and sponsored by McChrystal's current boss, Gates, is in charge of one of the three groups the Pentagon and NATO are waging ever-escalating counterinsurgency operations in South Asia against.

To make matters even more intriguing, former British foreign secretary Robin Cook - as loyal a pro-American Atlanticist as exists - conceded in the Guardian on July 8, 2005 that "Bin Laden was...a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of Mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."

Russian analyst and vice president of the Center for Political Technologies Sergey Mikheev was quoted in early September as contending that "Afghanistan is a stage in the division of the world after the bipolar system failed. They [U.S. and NATO] wanted to consolidate their grip on Eurasia...and deployed a lot of troops there. The Taliban card was played, although nobody had been interested in the Taliban before." [7]

Pentagon chief Gates' 27 years in the CIA, including his tenure as director of the agency from 1991-1993, is being brought to bear on the Afghan war according to the Los Angeles Times of September 19, 2009, which revealed that "The CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence 'surge' that will make its station there among the largest in the agency's history, U.S. officials say."

"When complete, the CIA's presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its massive stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. Precise numbers are classified, but one U.S. official said the agency already has nearly 700 employees in Afghanistan."

"The intelligence expansion goes beyond the CIA to involve every major spy service, officials said, including the National Security Agency, which intercepts calls and e-mails, as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency, which tracks military threats."

U.S. and NATO Commander McChrystal will put the CIA to immediate use in his plans for an all-out counterinsurgency campaign. The Los Angeles Times article added:

"McChrystal is expected to expand the use of teams that combine CIA operatives with special operations soldiers. In Iraq, where he oversaw the special operations forces from 2003 to 2008, McChrystal used such teams to speed up the cycle of gathering intelligence and carrying out raids aimed at killing or capturing insurgents."

"The CIA is also carrying out an escalating campaign of unmanned Predator missile strikes on Al Qaeda and insurgent strongholds in Pakistan. The number of strikes so far this year, 37, already exceeds the 2008 total, according to data compiled by the Long War Journal website, which tracks Predator strikes in Pakistan."

Indeed, on September 13 it was reported that "Two NATO fighter jets reportedly flew inside Pakistan's airspace for nearly two hours on Saturday."

"The airspace violation took place in different parts of the Khyber Agency bordering the Afghan border." [8]

Two days later "NATO fighter jets in Afghanistan...violated Pakistani airspace and dropped bombs on the country's northwest region."

"NATO warplanes bombed the South Waziristan tribal region....Moreover, CIA operated spy drone planes continued low-altitude flights in several towns of the Waziristan region." [9]

The dramatic upsurge in CIA deployments in South Asia won't be limited to Afghanistan. Neighboring Pakistan will be further overrun by U.S. intelligence operatives also.

On September 12 a petition was filed in the Supreme Court of Pakistan contesting the announced expansion of the U.S. embassy in the nation's capital.

"Pakistani media have been reporting that the United States plans to deploy a large number of marines with the plan to expand its embassy in Islamabad." [10]

The challenge was organized by Barrister Zafarullah Khan, who "said that Saudi Arabia was also trying to get 700,000 acres (283,400 hectares) of land in the country."

He was quoted on the day of the presentation of the petition as warning "Giving away Pakistani land to U.S. and Arab countries in this fashion is a threat for the stability and sovereignty of the country" and "further added that the purpose of giving the land to U.S. embassy was to establish an American military base...there."

"He maintained that such a big land was enough even to construct a military airport." [11]

Intelligence personnel and special forces are being matched by military equipment in the intensification of the West's war in South Asia.

On September 10 Reuters revealed in an article titled "U.S. eyes military equipment in Iraq for Pakistan" that "The Pentagon has proposed transferring U.S. military equipment from Iraq to Pakistani security forces to help Islamabad step up its offensive against the Taliban...."

A U.S. armed forces publication a few days afterward wrote that "U.S. hardware is moving out of Iraq by the ton, much of it going straight to the overstretched forces in increasingly volatile Afghanistan" and "The U.S. military has already started moving an estimated 1.5 million pieces of equipment - everything from batteries to tanks - by ground, rail and air either to Afghanistan for immediate use...." [12]

In the middle of this month "U.S. military leaders infused Gen. Stanley McChrystal's ideas of how to win the war in Afghanistan" by conducting a large-scale counterinsurgency exercise in Grafenwoehr, Germany.

"Dozens of Pashtun speakers joined more than 6,500 U.S. troops and civilians in an exercise for the Afghanistan-bound 173rd Airborne Brigade and Iraq-bound 12th Combat Aviation Brigade. It was the largest such exercise ever held by the U.S. military outside of the United States...." [13]

The Pentagon and NATO have their work cut out for them.

"A security map by the London-based International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) showed a deepening security crisis with substantial Taliban activity in at least 97 percent of the war-ravaged country."

"The Council added that the militants now have a permanent presence in 80 percent of the country." [14]

The United States is not alone in sinking deeper into the Afghan morass.

On September 14 U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, in celebrating the "resilience and deep-seated support from our allies for what is happening in Afghanistan," was equally enthusiastic in proclaiming "Over 40 percent of the body bags that leave Afghanistan do not go to the U.S. They go to other countries...." [15]

Daalder also gave the lie to earlier claims that NATO troop increases leading up to last month's presidential election were temporary in nature by acknowledging that "Many of the extra troops that NATO countries sent to Afghanistan for the August presidential elections would stay on." [16]

Leading up to the Washington Post's publication of the McChrystal assessment, NATO's Military Committee held a two-day conference in Lisbon, Portugal which was attended by McChrystal and NATO's two Strategic Commanders, Admiral Stavridis (Supreme Allied Commander, Operations) and General Abrial (Supreme Allied Commander, Transformation) which "focused mainly on the operation in Afghanistan and on the New Strategic Concept." [17]

The 28 NATO defense chiefs present laid a wreath to the Alliance's first war dead, those killed in Afghanistan.

Earlier this month the Washington Post reported that "The U.S. military and NATO are launching a major overhaul of the way they recruit, train and equip Afghanistan's security forces," an announcement that came "in advance of expected recommendations by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal." [18]

The article quoted Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"We're going to need many more trainers, hopefully including a much larger number of NATO trainers. We're going to need a surge of equipment that is coming out of Iraq and, instead of coming home, a great deal of it should be going to Afghanistan instead." [19]

According to the same report, this month NATO will "will establish a new command led by a three-star military officer to oversee recruiting and generating Afghan forces."

"The goal is to 'bring more coherence' to uncoordinated efforts by NATO contingents in Afghanistan while underscoring that the mission 'is not just America's challenge'..." [20]

Contributing to its quota of body bags, NATO has experienced losses in Afghanistan that have reached record levels. "According to the icasualties website, 363 foreign soldiers have died in Afghanistan so far this year, compared to 294 for all of 2008." [21]

This month Britain lost its 216th soldier in the nearly eight-year war. Canada lost its 131st. Denmark its 25th. Italy its 20th. Poland, where a recent poll showed 81 percent support for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, its 12th.

Russian ambassador to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov, who had been in the nation in the 1980s, was cited by Associated Press on September 12 as reflecting that in 2002 the U.S. had 5,000 troops in the nation and "Taliban controlled just a small corner of the country's southeast."

"Now we have Taliban fighting in the peaceful Kunduz and Baghlan (provinces) with your (NATO's) 100,000 troops. And if this trend is the rule, if you bring 200,000 soldiers here, all of Afghanistan will be under the Taliban."

Associated Press also cited Kabulov's concern that "the U.S. and its allies are competing with Russia for influence in the energy-rich region....Afghanistan remains a strategic prize because of its location near the gas and oil fields of Iran, the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf."

He also said "Russia has questions about NATO's intentions in Afghanistan, which...lies outside of the alliance's 'political domain'" and "Moscow is concerned that NATO is building permanent bases in the region."

The concerns are legitimate in light of this month's latest quadrennial report by the Pentagon on security threats which "put emerging superpower China and former Cold War foe Russia alongside Iran and North Korea on a list of the four main nations challenging American interests." [22]

At the same time a U.S. military newspaper reported on statements by Pentagon chief Robert Gates:

"Gates said the roughly $6.5 billion he has proposed to upgrade the [Air Force] fleet assures U.S. domination of the skies for decades."

"By the time China produces its first - 5th generation - fighter, he said, the U.S. will have more than 1,000 F-22s and F-35s. And while the U.S. conducted 35,000 refueling missions last year, Russia performed about 30."

"The secretary also highlighted new efforts to support robust space and cyber commands, as well as the new Global Strike Command that oversees the nuclear arsenal." [23]

To add to Russian and Chinese apprehensions about NATO's role in South and Central Asia, ten days ago the U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, which borders Russia and China, "offered to Kazakhstan to take part in the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan."

At the opening ceremony of the NATO Steppe Eagle-2009 military exercises in that nation envoy Richard Hoagland said "Kazakhstan may again become part of the international NATO peacekeeping force in Afghanistan." [24]

Radio Free Europe reported on September 16 that NATO was to sign new agreements with Kyrgyzstan, which also borders China, for the use of the Manas Air Base that as many as 200,000 U.S. and NATO troops have passed through since the beginning of the Afghan war.

On the same day NATO' plans for expanding transit routes through the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region were described. "[T]he air corridor through Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan is the most feasible."

"This route will be best suited if ISAF transport planes fly directly to Baku from Turkey or any other NATO member....Moreover, it [Azerbaijan] is not a CSTO [Collective Security Treaty Organization] member, which allows Azerbaijan more freedom for maneuver in the region when dealing with NATO." [25]

Just as troops serving under NATO command in the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now include those from almost fifty countries on five continents, so the broadening scope of the war is absorbing vaster tracts of Eurasia and the Middle East.

America's longest armed conflict since that in Indochina and NATO's first ground war threatens to not only remain the world's most dangerous conflagration but also one that plunges the 21st Century into a war without end.

Notes:

1) New York Times, February 16, 1989

2) Radio Netherlands, September 12, 2009

3) Associated Press, September 15, 2009

4) Reuters, September 19, 2009

5) Ibid

6) BBC News, December 1, 2008

7) Russia Today, September 7, 2009

8) Asian News International, September 13, 2009

9) Press TV, September 15, 2009

10) Xinhua News, September 12, 2009

11) Ibid

12) Stars and Stripes, September 19, 2009

13) Stars and Stripes, September 13, 2009

14) Trend News Agency, September 11, 2009

15) Reuters, September 14, 2009

16) Ibid

17) NATO, September 20, 2009

18) The Washington Post, September 12, 2009

19) Ibid

20) Ibid

21) Agence France-Presse, September 22, 2009

22) Agence France-Presse, September 15, 2009

23) Stars and Stripes, September 16, 2009

24) Interfax, September 14, 2009

25) Jamestown Foundation, Eurasia Daily Monitor, September 16, 2009

Editor's Comment:

It has become painfully obvious that despite the election of Barack Obama who was billed as a "peace (albeit weak) candidate", there is no evidence that the United States intends to end its empire any time soon. Despite a massive national debt, record breaking budget deficit, shrinking middle class, and almost non-existent manufacturing base, the elites who control foreign and domestic policy are currently positioning the country for a full-scale conflagration in the Middle East and Eurasia. This is extremely dangerous especially in light of the Obama administration's reaction to the latest disclosure that Iran has proceeded with the development of another nuclear facility. While Iran's nuclear capabilities in no way threaten the American continent now or any time soon, it is clear that Iran has become the new threat by which an increasingly belligerent military posture will be justified. In addition to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the possibility of military action against Iran grows ever larger by the day.

This is an exceedingly dangerous time. Pakistan has functional nuclear weapons which could be detonated even if by mistake given the instability which now exists as a result of US bombing in that country. For Roman Catholics who are aware that Our Lady of Fatima predicted the annihilation of many nations if Russia was not consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart (which has yet to be done), all of these developments are indeed sobering.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert